Barbara wertheim tuchman the guns of august (v5 0)

“BRILLIANT … EXCITING.”
—The Washington Post
“I have been unable to put this book down … Barbara W. Tuchman writes brilliantly and inspiringly …
Battle eld scenes, strategic problems and the rise and fall of powerful personalities are all part of Mrs.
Tuchman’s canvas … The Guns of August is lucid, fair, critical, and witty.”

—CYRILL FALLS
The New York Times Book Review
“Brilliant … Her narrative grips the mind; she does not need maps … Instead, she uses excellent
descriptions of places and, above all, puts emphasis on the commanders and how they made their
decisions.”

—The New Yorker
“The Guns of August is a ne demonstration that with su cient art rather specialized history can be raised

to the level of literature … [Tuchman] is a writer of wit and grace. Her prose is elegant and polished

without being fancy or formal. She has a sardonic sense of humor and an original mind. Her passing
comments are quotable and trenchant. Her ability is exceptional in juggling a dozen scenes of simultaneous
action, in clarifying the technicalities of military operations and in maintaining a judicious objectivity.”

—The New York Times


By Barbara W. Tuchman
BIBLE AND SWORD (1956)
THE ZIMMERMANN TELEGRAM (1958)
THE GUNS OF AUGUST (1962)
THE PROUD TOWER (1966)
STILWELL AND THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE IN CHINA (1971)

NOTES FROM CHINA (1972)
A DISTANT MIRROR (1978)
PRACTICING HISTORY (1981)
THE MARCH OF FOLLY (1984)
THE FIRST SALUTE (1988)

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“The human heart is the starting point of all matters pertaining to war.”
MARÉCHAL DE SAXE
Reveries on the Art of War (Preface), 1732

“The terrible Ifs accumulate.”
WINSTON CHURCHILL
The World Crisis, Vol. I, Chap. XI


Foreword

DURING THE LAST WEEK of January, 1962, John Glenn delayed for the third time his attempt to
rocket into space and become the nation’s rst earth-orbiting human. Bill “Moose”
Skowren, the Yankee’s veteran rst baseman, having had a good year (561 at bats, 28
home runs, 89 runs batted in), was given a $3,000 raise which elevated his annual
salary to $35,000. Franny and Zooey was at the top of the ction bestseller list, followed
a few notches down by To Kill a Mockingbird. At the top of the non ction list was My Life
in Court by Louis Nizer. That week also saw the publication of one of the nest works of
history written by an American in our century.

The Guns of August was an immediate, overwhelming success. Reviewers were
enthusiastic and word-of-mouth quickly attracted readers by the tens of thousands.
President Kennedy gave a copy to Prime Minister Macmillan, observing that somehow
contemporary statesmen must avoid the pitfalls that led to August, 1914. The Pulitzer
Committee, forbidden by the donor’s will to reward a work on a non-American subject
with the Prize for History, found a solution by awarding Mrs. Tuchman a Prize for
General Non ction. The Guns of August made the author’s reputation; her work
thereafter was gripping and elegant, but most readers needed only to know that the
new book was “by Barbara Tuchman.”
What is it about this book—essentially a military history of the rst month of the First
World War—which gives it its stamp and has created its enormous reputation? Four
qualities stand out: a wealth of vivid detail which keeps the reader immersed in events,
almost as an eyewitness; a prose style which is transparently clear, intelligent,
controlled, and witty; a cool detachment of moral judgment—Mrs. Tuchman is never
preachy or reproachful; she draws on skepticism, not cynicism, leaving the reader not so
much outraged by human villainy as amused and saddened by human folly. These rst
three qualities are present in all of Barbara Tuchman’s work, but in The Guns of August
there is a fourth which makes the book, once taken up, almost impossible to set aside.
Remarkably, she persuades the reader to suspend any foreknowledge of what is about to
happen. Her narrative sets in motion a gigantic German Army—three eld armies,
sixteen army corps, thirty-seven divisions, 700,000 men—wheeling through Belgium,
marching on Paris. This tidal wave of men, horses, artillery and carts is cascading down
the dusty roads of northern France, sweeping implacably, apparently irresistibly,
toward its goal of seizing the city and ending the war in the West, just as the the
Kaiser’s generals had planned, within six weeks. The reader, watching the Germans
advance, may already know that they won’t arrive, that von Kluck will turn aside and
that, after the Battle of the Marne, millions of men on both sides will stumble into the
trenches to begin their endurance of four years of slaughter. And yet, so great is Mrs.
Tuchman’s skill that the reader forgets what he knows. Surrounded by the thunder of
guns, the thrust and parry of bayonet and sabre, he becomes almost a participant. Will

the exhausted Germans keep coming? Can the desperate French and British hold? Will
Paris fall? Mrs. Tuchman’s triumph is that she makes the events of August, 1914, as
suspenseful on the page as they were to the people living through them.
When The Guns of August appeared, Barbara Tuchman was described in the press as a
fty-year-old housewife, a mother of three daughters, and the spouse of a prominent
New York City physician. The truth was more complicated and interesting. She was
descended from two of the great intellectual and commercial Jewish families of New
York City. Her grandfather, Henry Morgenthau, Sr., was Ambassador to Turkey during
the First World War. Her uncle, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., was Franklin Roosevelt’s
Secretary of the Treasury for over twelve years. Mrs. Tuchman’s father, Maurice
Wertheim, had founded an investment banking house. Her childhood homes were a vestory brownstone on the Upper East Side, at which a French governess read aloud to her
from Racine and Corneille, and a country house with barns and horses in Connecticut.
There were dinners with a father who had forbidden mention of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
One day, the adolescent daughter transgressed and was commanded to leave her chair.
Sitting very straight, Barbara said, “I am too old to be sent away from the table.” Her
father stared in amazement—but she remained.
When the time came for Mrs. Tuchman to graduate from Radcli e, she skipped the
ceremony, preferring to accompany her grandfather to the World Monetary and
Economic Conference in London where he headed the U.S. delegation. She spent a year
in Tokyo as a research assistant for the Institute of Paci c Relations, and then became a
edgling writer at The Nation, which her father had bought to save it from bankruptcy.
At twenty-four, she covered the Spanish Civil War from Madrid.
In June, 1940, on the day Hitler entered Paris, she married Dr. Lester Tuchman in
New York City. Dr. Tuchman, about to go o to war, believed that the world just then
was an unpromising place to bring up children. Mrs. Tuchman replied that “if we wait
for the outlook to improve, we might wait forever and that if we want a child at all, we
should have it now, regardless of Hitler.” The rst of their daughters was born nine
months later. During the forties and fties, Mrs. Tuchman dovetailed raising children

and writing her rst books. Bible and Sword, a history of the founding of Israel,
appeared in 1954; The Zimmermann Telegram followed in 1958. The latter, an account of
the German Foreign Minister’s 1917 attempt to lure Mexico into war with the United
States by promising the return of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California, written
with high style and wry humor, was a taste of things to come.
Over the years, as The Guns of August was followed by The Proud Tower, Stilwell and
the American Experience in China, A Distant Mirror, The March of Folly, and The First Salute,
Barbara Tuchman came to be regarded almost as a national treasure. People wondered
how she did it. In a number of speeches and essays (collected into a volume titled
Practicing History), she told them. The first, indispensable quality she declared was “being
in love with your subject.” She described one of her professors at Harvard, a man
passionately in love with the Magna Carta, remembering “how his blue eyes blazed as
he discussed it and how I sat on the edge of my seat then too.” She admitted how


depressed she was years later by meeting an unhappy graduate student forced to write a
thesis, not on a subject about which he was enthusiastic, but which had been suggested
by his department as needful of original research. How can it interest others, she
wondered, if it doesn’t interest you? Her own books were about people or events which
intrigued her. Something caught her eye, she looked into it, and, whether the subject
was obscure or well-known, if she found her curiousity growing, she kept going. In the
end, she managed to bring to each of her subjects new facts, new perspectives, new life,
and new meaning. Of this particular August, she found that “there was an aura about
1914 that caused those who sensed it to shiver for mankind.” Once she communicates
her own fascination, her readers, bourne along by her passion and skill, never escape
her narrative clutch.
She began with research; that is, by accumulating facts. She had read widely all her
life, but her purpose now was to immerse herself in this time and these events; to put
herself at the elbow of the people whose lives she was describing. She read letters,
telegrams, diaries, memoirs, cabinet documents, battle orders, secret codes, and billet

doux. She inhabited libraries—the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress, the
National Archives, the British Library and Public Record O ce, the Bibliotèque National,
the Sterling Library at Yale, and the Widener Library at Harvard. (As a student, she
recalled, the stacks at the Widener had been “my Archimedes bathtub, my burning bush,
my dish of mold where I found my personal penicillin … I was blissful as a cow put to
graze in a eld of fresh clover and would not have cared if I had been locked in for the
night.”) One summer before writing The Guns of August, she rented a small Renault and
toured the battle elds of Belgium and France: “I saw the elds ripe with grain which the
cavalry would have trampled, measured the great width of the Meuse at Liège, and saw
how the lost territory of Alsace looked to the French soldiers who gazed down upon it
from the heights of the Vosges.” In libraries, on battle elds, at her desk, her quarry was
always the vivid, speci c fact which would imprint on the reader’s mind the essential
nature of the man or event. Some examples:
The Kaiser: the “possessor of the least inhibited tongue in Europe.”
The Archduke Franz Ferdinand: “the future source of tragedy, tall, corpulent, and
corseted, with green plumes waving from his helmet.”
Von Schlie en, architect of the German war plan: “of the two classes of Prussian
officer, the bullnecked and the wasp-waisted, he belonged to the second.”
Jo re, the French commander-in-chief: “massive and paunchy in his baggy uniform …
Jo re looked like Santa Claus and gave an impression of benevolence and naiveté—two
qualities not noticeably part of his character.”
Sukhomlinov, the Russian Minister of War: “artful, indolent, pleasure-loving, chubby
… with an almost feline manner,” who, “smitten by the twenty-three-year-old wife of a
provincial governor, contrived to get rid of the husband by divorce on framed evidence
and marry the beautiful residue as his fourth wife.”
The larger purpose in Barbara Tuchman’s research was to nd out, simply, what


really happened and, as best she could, how it actually felt for the people present. She
had little use for systems or systemizers in history and quoted approvingly an

anonymous reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement who said, “The historian who puts
his system rst can hardly escape the heresy of preferring the facts which suit his system
best.” She recommended letting the facts lead the way. “To nd out what happened in
history is enough at the outset,” she said, “without trying too soon to make sure of the
‘why.’ I believe it is safer to leave the ‘why’ alone until one has not only gathered the
facts but arranged them in sequence; to be exact, in sentences, paragraphs, and
chapters. The very process of transforming a collection of personalities, dates, gun
calibers, letters, and speeches into a narrative eventually forces the ‘why’ to the
surface.”
The problem with research, of course, was knowing when to stop. “One must stop
before one has nished,” she advised, “otherwise, one will never stop and never nish.”
“Research,” she explained, “is endlessly seductive, but writing is hard work.” Eventually,
however, she began to select, to distill, to give the facts coherence, to create patterns, to
construct narrative form; in short, to write. The writing process, she said, was
“laborious, slow, often painful, sometimes agony. It requires rearrangement, revision,
adding, cutting, rewriting. But it brings a sense of excitement, almost of rapture, a
moment on Olympus.” Surprisingly, it took years for her to develop her famous style.
Her thesis at Radcli e came back with a note: “Style undistinguished.” Her rst book
Bible and Sword collected thirty rejection slips before it found a publisher. She persisted
and ultimately arrived at a formula that worked : “hard work, a good ear, and
continued practice.”
Mrs. Tuchman believed most of all in the power of “that magni cent instrument that
lies at the command of all of us—the English language.” Indeed, her allegiance often
was split between her subject and the instrument for expressing it. “I am a writer rst
whose subject is history,” she said, and, “The art of writing interests me as much as the
art of history … I am seduced by the sound of words and by the interaction of their
sounds and sense.” Sometimes, when she believed that she had arrived at a particularly
felicitous phrase or sentence or paragraph, she wanted to share it immediately and
telephoned her editor to read it to him. Precisely controlled, elegant language, she felt,
was the instrument to give voice to history. Her ultimate objective was “to make the

reader turn the page.”
In a time of mass-culture egalitarianism and mediocrity, she was an elitist. For her,
the two essential criteria of quality were “intensive e ort and honesty of purpose. The
di erence is not only a matter of artistic skill, but of intent. You do it well or you do it
half well,” she said.
Her relations with academics, critics, and reviewers were wary. She did not have a
Ph.D. “It’s what saved me, I think,” she said, believing that the requirements of
conventional academic life can stultify imagination, sti e enthusiasm and deaden prose
style. “The academic historian,” she said, “su ers from having a captive audience, rst
in the supervisor of his dissertation, then in the lecture hall. Keeping the reader turning


the page has not been his primary concern.” Someone suggested that she might enjoy
teaching. “Why should I teach?,” she responded vigorously. “I am a writer! I don’t want
to teach! I couldn’t teach if I tried!” For her, a writer’s place was in the library or the
eld doing research, or at the desk, writing. Herodotus, Thucydides, Gibbon, MacCauley,
and Parkman, she noted, did not have Ph.D.s.
Mrs. Tuchman was stung when reviewers, especially academic reviewers, sni ed that
her work was “popular history,” implying that because it sold a great many copies, it
failed to meet their own exacting standards. She routinely ignored the policy most
writers observe of never responding to negative reviews, because to do so simply
provokes the reviewer and opens further avenues of harm. She red right back. “I have
noticed,” she wrote to The New York Times, “that reviewers who are in a great hurry to
complain of an author’s failure to include this or that have usually themselves failed to
read the text under review.” And again: “Non ction authors understand that reviewers
must nd some error to expose in order to show their own erudition and we wait
especially to know what it will be.” Eventually, most academics were won over—or, at
least, backed away from confrontation. Over the years, she gave addresses at, and
collected degrees from, many of the greatest universities in the land, won two Pulitzer
Prizes, and became the rst woman elected president of the American Academy and

Institute of Arts and Letters in its eighty-year existence.
For all the combativeness of her professional personality, there was a rare tolerance
in Barbara Tuchman’s writing. The vain, the pompous, the greedy, the foolish, the
cowardly—all were described in human terms and, where possible, given the bene t of
the doubt. A good example of this is her analysis of why Sir John French, the previously
ery commander of the British Expeditionary Force in France, seemed unwilling to send
his troops into battle: “Whether the cause was [Minister of War, Lord] Kitchener’s
instructions with their emphasis on keeping the army in being and their caution against
‘losses and wastage,’ or whether it was a sudden realization percolating into Sir John
French’s consciousness that behind the BEF was no national body of trained reserves to
take its place, or whether on reaching the Continent within a few miles of a formidable
enemy and certain battle the weight of responsibility oppressed him, or whether all
along beneath his bold words and manner the natural juices of courage had been
invisibly drying up … no one who has not been in the same position can judge.”
Barbara Tuchman wrote history to tell the story of human struggle, achievement,
frustration, and defeat, not to draw moral conclusions. Nevertheless, The Guns of August
o ers lessons. Foolish monarchs, diplomats, and generals blundered into a war nobody
wanted, an Armageddon which evolved with the same grim irreversability as a Greek
tragedy. “In the month of August, 1914,” she wrote, “there was something looming,
inescapable, universal that involved us all. Something in that awful gulf between perfect
plans and fallible men that makes one tremble with a sense of ‘There but for the Grace
of God go we.’” Her hope was that people reading her book might take warning, avoid
these mistakes, and do a little better. It was this e ort and these lessons which attracted
presidents and prime ministers as well as millions of ordinary readers.


Family and work dominated Barbara Tuchman’s life. What gave her the most pleasure
was to sit at a table, writing. She permitted no distractions. Once, after she was famous,
her daughter Alma told her that Jane Fonda and Barbra Streisand wanted her to write a
movie script. She shook her head. “But, Ma,” said Alma, “don’t you even want to meet

Jane Fonda?” “Oh, no,” said Mrs. Tuchman. “I don’t have time. I’m working.” She wrote
her rst drafts in longhand on a yellow legal pad with “everything messed up and x’d
out and inserted.” She followed with drafts on the typewriter, triple-spaced, ready to be
scissored apart and Scotch-taped back together in a di erent sequence. Customarily, she
worked for four or ve hours at a stretch, without interruption. “The summer she was
finishing The Guns of August,” her daughter Jessica remembers, “she was behind schedule
and desperate to catch up … To get away from the telephone she set up a card table and
a chair in an old dairy attached to the stables—a room that was cold even in summer.
She would go to work at 7:30 A.M. My job was to bring her lunch on a tray at 12:30 P.M.—
a sandwich, V-8 juice, a piece of fruit. Every day, approaching silently on the pine
needles that surrounded the stables, I’d nd her in the same position, always engrossed.
At 5 P.M. or so she stopped.”
One of the paragraphs Barbara Tuchman wrote that summer took her eight hours to
complete and became the most famous passage in all her work. It is the opening
paragraph of The Guns of August which begins “So gorgeous was the spectacle on the
May morning of 1910 …” By turning the page, the fortunate person who has not yet
encountered this book can begin to read.
—Robert K. Massie


Preface

THE GENESIS OF THIS BOOK lies in two earlier books I wrote, of which the First World War was
the focal point of both. The rst was Bible and Sword, about the origins of the Balfour
Declaration issued in 1917 in anticipation of the British entry into Jerusalem in the
course of the war against Turkey in the Middle East. As the center and source of the
Judaeo-Christian religion, and incidentally of the Moslem as well, although that was a
matter of lesser concern at the time, the taking of the sacred city was felt to be an
awesome moment requiring some major gesture to accompany it and provide a tting
moral foundation. An o cial statement recognizing Palestine as the national homeland

of the original inhabitants was conceived to ful ll the need, not in consequence of any
philo-Semitism but in consequence rather of two other factors: the in uence in British
culture of the Bible, especially the Old Testament, and a twin in uence in that year of
what the Manchester Guardian called “the insistent logic of the military situation on the
banks of the Suez Canal,” in short, Bible and Sword.
The second of the two books preceding The Guns was The Zimmermann Telegram, a
proposal by the then German foreign minister, Arthur Zimmermann, to induce Mexico
together with Japan to make war as an ally of Germany on the United States with the
promise of regaining her lost territories of Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas.
Zimmermann’s clever idea was to keep the United States busy on her own continent so
as to prevent her entering the war in Europe. However, it accomplished the reverse,
when in the form of a wireless telegram to the president of Mexico, it was decoded by
the British and made available to and published by the American government.
Zimmermann’s proposal aroused the anger of the public and helped to precipitate the
United States into the war.
I had always thought in my acquaintance with history up to that point, that 1914 was
the hour when the clock struck, so to speak, the date that ended the nineteenth century
and began our own age, “the Terrible Twentieth” as Churchill called it. In seeking the
subject for a book, I felt that 1914 was it. But I did not know what should be the
gateway or the framework. Just at the moment when I was oundering in search of the
right approach, a small miracle dropped in my lap when my agent called to ask, “Would
you like to talk to a publisher who wants you to do a book on 1914?” I was struck, as
the phrase goes, all of a heap, but not to the extent that I couldn’t say, “Well, yes I
would,” even if rather perturbed that someone else had my idea, although happy he had
it with regard to the right person.
He was a Britisher, Cecil Scott of the Macmillan Company, now regretfully deceased,
and what he wanted as he told me later when we met, was a book about what really
happened at the Battle of Mons, the rst encounter overseas of the BEF (the British
Expeditionary Force) in 1914, which had been such an extraordinary survival and check
to the Germans that legends grew of supernatural intervention. I was going skiing that

week after the meeting with Mr. Scott and took along a suitcase of books to Vermont.
I came home with the proposal to do a book on the escape of the Goeben, the German
battleship, which, by eluding a pursuit by British cruisers in the Mediterranean, had
reached Constantinople and brought Turkey and with it the whole Ottoman Empire of
the Middle East into the war, determining the course of the history of that area from
that day to this. The Goeben seemed a natural for me for it had become family history
which we had witnessed, including myself at the age of two. That happened when we,
too, were crossing the Mediterranean en route to Constantinople to visit my
grandfather, who was then American ambassador to the Porte. It was an often-told story
in the family circle how the pu s of gunsmoke from the pursuing British cruisers were
seen from our ship, and how the Goeben put on speed and got away, and how on
arriving at Constantinople we were the rst to bring news to o cials and diplomats of
the capital of the drama at sea that we had seen. My mother’s account of her heavy
questioning by the German ambassador before she could even debark or had a chance to
greet her father was my first impression, almost at firsthand, of the German manner.
Almost thirty years later when I returned from my skiing week in Vermont and told
Mr. Scott that this was the story of 1914 that I wanted to write, he said No, that was not
what he wanted. He was still xed on Mons. How had the BEF thrown back the
Germans? Had they really seen the vision of an angel over the battle eld? And what
was the basis of the legend of the Angel of Mons, afterward so important on the
Western Front? Frankly, I was still more interested in the Goeben than in the Angel of
Mons, but the fact of a publisher ready for a book on 1914 was more important than
either.
The war as a whole seemed too large and beyond my capacity. But Mr. Scott kept
telling me I could do it, and when I formed the plan of keeping to the war’s rst month,
which contained all the roots, including the Goeben and the Battle of Mons, to make us
both happy, the project began to seem feasible.
When mired among all those Roman-numeraled corps and left and right anks, I soon

felt out of my depth and felt I should have gone to Sta and Command School for ten
years before undertaking a book of this kind, especially when trying to tell how the
French on the defensive managed to regain Alsace at the very beginning, which I never
did understand but I managed to weave my way in and around it, a maneuver one
learns in the process of writing history—to mu e the facts a bit when one can’t
understand everything—watch Gibbon do it in those sonorous balanced sentences which,
if you analyze them, often turn out to make little sense, but you forget that in the
marvel of their structure. I am no Gibbon, but I have learned the value of venturing into
the unfamiliar instead of returning to a eld of previous study where one already knows
the source material and all the persons and circumstances. To do the latter makes the
work certainly easier, but removes any sense of discovery and surprise, which is why I
like moving to a new subject for a new book. Though it may distress the critics, it
pleases me. Since I was hardly known to the critics when The Guns was published, with
no reputation for them to enjoy smashing, the book received instead the warmest


reception. Clifton Fadiman wrote in the Book-of-the-Month Club bulletin: “One must be
careful with the big words. Still, there is a fair chance that The Guns of August may turn
out to be a historical classic. Its virtues are almost Thucydidean: intelligence, concision,
weight detachment. Dealing with the days preceding and following the outbreak of the
First World War, its subject like that of Thucydides goes beyond the limited scope and
reach of the mere narrative. For in hard, sculptured prose this book xes the moments
that have led inexorably to our own time. It places our dread day in long perspective,
arguing that if most of the world’s men, women and children are soon to be burned to
atoms, the annihilation would seem to proceed directly out of the mouths of the guns
that spoke in August 1914. This may be an oversimpli cation but it describes the
author’s thesis which she presents with deadly quiet. It is her conviction that the
deadlock of the terrible month of August determined the future course of the war and the
terms of the peace, the shape of the inter-war period and the conditions of the Second
Round.”

He then went on to describe the main actors in the narrative, saying that “one of the
marks of the superior historian is the ability to project human beings as well as events,”
and he picked out the salient characters—the Kaiser, King Albert, generals Jo re and
Foch, among others, just as I had tried to convey them, which made me feel I had
succeeded in what I intended. I was so moved by Fadiman’s understanding, not to
mention being compared to Thucydides, that I found myself in tears, a reaction that I
have never known again. To elicit perfect comprehension is perhaps to be expected only
once.
I suppose the important thing to say in introducing an anniversary edition is whether
the signi cance given to it historically holds up. I think it does. There are no passages I
would wish to change.
While the best-known part is the opening scene on the funeral of Edward VII, the
closing paragraph of the Afterword expresses for the book, or rather for its subject, the
meaning in our history of the Great War. Though it may be presumptuous of me to say
so, I think this is as well stated as any summary of World War I that I know.
On top of Fadiman’s praise came a startling prediction by Publishers Weekly, the bible
of the book trade. “The Guns of August,” it declared, “will be the biggest new non ction
seller in your winter season.” Carried away by its own superlative, PW was led to some
rather eccentric prose stating that the book “will grip the American reading public with
a new enthusiasm for the electric moments of this hitherto neglected chapter of history
…” I did not think that “enthusiasm” for the Great War was quite the noun I would have
chosen, or that one could feel “enthusiasm” for “electric moments” or that one could
justly call World War I, which had the longest list of titles in the New York Public
Library, a “neglected chapter” in history, nevertheless I was pleased by PW’s hearty
welcome. Given the fact that in moments of depression during the course of writing, I
had said to Mr. Scott, “Who is going to read this?” and he had replied, “Two people: you
will and I will.” That was hardly encouraging, which made PW’s pronouncement all the
more astonishing to me. As it turned out, they were right. The Guns took o like a

runaway horse, and my children, to whom I assigned the royalties and foreign rights,
have been receiving nice little checks ever since. When divided among three, the amount
may be small, but it is good to know that after twenty-six years the book is still making
its way to new readers.
With this new edition I am happy that the book [is being introduced] to a new
generation, and I hope that in middle age it will not have lost its charm or, to put it
more appropriately, its interest.
—Barbara W. Tuchman


Author’s Note

THIS BOOK owes a primary debt to Mr. Cecil Scott of The Macmillan Company whose
advice and encouragement and knowledge of the subject were an essential element and
a rm support from beginning to end. I have also been fortunate in the critical
collaboration of Mr. Denning Miller who in clarifying many problems of writing and
interpretation made this a better book than it would otherwise have been. For his help I
am permanently grateful.
I should like to express my appreciation of the unsurpassed resources of the New York
Public Library and, at the same time, a hope that somehow, someday in my native city a
way will be found to make the Library’s facilities for scholars match its incomparable
material. My thanks go also to the New York Society Library for the continuing
hospitality of its stacks and the haven of a place to write; to Mrs. Agnes F. Peterson of
the Hoover Library at Stanford for the loan of the Briey Procés-Verbaux and for running
to earth the answers to many queries; to Miss R. E. B. Coombe of the Imperial War
Museum, London, for many of the illustrations; to the sta of the Bibliothèque de
Documentation Internationale Contemporaine Paris, for source material and to Mr.
Henry Sachs of the American Ordnance Association for technical advice and for
supplementing my inadequate German.
To the reader I must explain that the omission of Austria-Hungary, Serbia, and the

Russo-Austrian and Serbo-Austrian fronts was not entirely arbitrary. The inexhaustible
problem of the Balkans divides itself naturally from the rest of the war. Moreover,
operations on the Austrian front during the rst thirty-one days were purely preliminary
and did not reach a climax, with e ect on the war as a whole, until the Battle of
Lemberg against the Russians and the Battle of the Drina against the Serbs. These took
place between September 8 and 17, outside my chronological limits, and it seemed to
me there was unity without it and the prospect of tiresome length if it were included.
After a period of total immersion in military memoirs, I had hoped to dispense with
Roman-numeraled corps, but convention proved stronger than good intentions. I can do
nothing about the Roman numerals which, it seems, are inseparably riveted to army
corps, but I can o er the reader a helpful R ULE ON LEFT AND RIGHT: rivers face downstream
and armies, even when turned around and retreating, are considered to face the
direction in which they started; that is, their left and right remain the same as when
they were advancing.
Sources for the narrative and for all quoted remarks are given in the Notes at the end
of the book. I have tried to avoid spontaneous attribution or the “he must have” style of
historical writing: “As he watched the coastline of France disappear, Napoleon must
have thought back over the long …” All conditions of weather, thoughts or feelings, and
states of mind public or private, in the following pages have documentary support.


Where it seems called for, the evidence appears in the Notes.


Contents

Foreword by Robert K. Massie
Preface
Author’s Note
Illustrations

Maps
1 A Funeral
2
3
4
5

6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20

PLANS
“Let the Last Man on the Right Brush the Channel with His Sleeve”
The Shadow of Sedan
“A Single British Soldier …”
The Russian Steam Roller
Outbreak
August 1: Berlin

August 1: Paris and London
Ultimatum in Brussels
“Home Before the Leaves Fall”

OUTBREAK

BATTLE

“Goeben … An Enemy Then Flying”
Liège and Alsace
BEF to the Continent
Sambre et Meuse
Debacle: Lorraine, Ardennes, Charleroi, Mons
“The Cossacks Are Coming!”
Tannenberg
The Flames of Louvain
Blue Water, Blockade, and the Great Neutral
Retreat
The Front Is Paris


21 Von Kluck’s Turn
22 “Gentlemen, We Will Fight on the Marne”
Afterword
Sources
Notes


Illustrations

General Joffre with General de Castelnau (left) and General Pau
Sir Henry Wilson talking with Foch and Colonel Huguet
General Sukhomlinov with staff officers
The Czar and Grand Duke Nicholas
The Kaiser and von Moltke
The Goeben
Admiral Souchon
King Albert
Field Marshal Sir John French
Prince Rupprecht and the Kaiser
General von François
Colonel Max Hoffmann
German cavalry officers in Brussels
Joffre, Poincaré, King George V, Foch, and Haig
General Gallieni
General von Kluck


Maps

Maps by William A. Pieper
Western Front
Eastern Front
The Mediterranean
The Assault on Liège
Battle of the Frontiers, August 20–23
Battle of Gumbinnen and Transfer of the Eighth Army
Battle of Tannenberg, August 25–30
The Retreat, August 25–September 1
Von Kluck’s Turn

Eve of the Marne, September 5